The curse of diplomacy

Who said, "If this happens, you will cut me off at the fucking knees for the rest of my fucking time in Washington"? A gangster? A drug dealer? The late Richard Nixon? No. As most Guardian readers will be aware, these words were spoken by Britain's former ambassador to the United States, Sir Christopher Meyer. They come in his new book, DC Confidential, extracts from which were published recently in this newspaper. Sir Christopher was responding furiously to the news - conveyed to him by Tony Blair's chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, on a plane taking them all from New York to Washington in September 2001 - that the prime minister had decided to replace him with Alastair Campbell as his companion at a working supper with President Bush.

One can see that this might have upset and humiliated the ambassador, but why did he have to express himself in such brutish language? Even today, some newspapers still use asterisks in place of the f-word. No such squeamishness inhibits Sir Christopher, current head of the Press Complaints Commission.

It was on Foreign Office mandarins such as Sir Christopher that we thought we could rely for subtlety and restraint in the use of English. What do we mean by "diplomatic language" if our diplomats now talk like Bob Geldof?

Sir Christopher claims not to have liked the way Powell said to him, when he was about to go off to Washington as ambassador in 1997, "We want you to get up the arse of the White House and stay there." "Trust the blokeishness of New Labour to reduce [my ambassadorial appointment] to an anal metaphor," he commented. But he still quoted Powell's remark with as much relish as he did his own f-words.

I'm no psychoanalyst, but I suspect there is something out of the ordinary about Sir Christopher's interest in matters sexual and lavatorial. I have only read the Guardian's extracts, but these contain plenty of stuff to feed this suspicion. He seems, for example, very interested in the prime minister's private parts. In addition to quoting Bush more than once as saying that Tony Blair has "cojones" ("balls"), he describes Blair's trousers at his first meeting with the president as "ball-crushingly tight" and his trouser pockets as appearing "glued to the groin".

Even more disturbing is his account of his early-morning meetings with John Major, when Meyer was his press secretary in Downing Street. He said he was admitted to the prime minister's bedroom while he was getting dressed, "no matter what stage this process had reached", and that "occasionally I was summoned into the prime ministerial bathroom where, as I spoke, he would discharge some ablution".

These are very unappealing images and give cause for anxiety about our former ambassador's psychological state. I think therapy may be the answer.